Butterfly Hunt

RT: What Is (and Isn’t) the Digital Humanities?

UPDATE: This post is finally up at my HASTAC blog. Apologies for double posting. Thank you all. 

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[N.B. I wrote this post originally for my HASTAC blog, but after trying several times to publish it and failing  I resorted to publishing it temporarily here on my blog. I had written it at first as a comment on Craig’s blog, but the comment disappeared after attempting to publishing it (I got no message of awaiting moderation either). It’s been a bad day for me and instant publishing… ]

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Today, in a blog post titled  ”The shock of the new in the Digital Humanities” Craig Bellamy raises interesting points about what the Digital Humanities are and are not. Dr Bellamy concludes that “the Digital Humanities is not about understanding the impact of mainstream computing […] it is about the scholarly use of computing to find out something new.” [My emphasis]. 

These points have occupied professionals and students in the area for some time now, but they still deserve further discussion. Indeed, one of the main conclusions drawn from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference in London earlier this year was that ‘the discipline’ needed to get better at explaining and promoting what it does and does not do. 

And yet- I would be wary of limiting the scope of the Digital Humanities to “the scholarly use of computing to find out something new.” (I also suppose there are many ways of understanding “scholarly” and “computing”, and that has to be discussed as well). “Understanding the impact of mainstream computing” is a scholarly activity that makes use of computing too. “Computing” is approach, methodology, discourse, “tool” and object of study. 

Whereas I can see how the problem of defining what it is that “Digital Humanists” do that other humanists using computers do not is complicated, I believe we should not be afraid of embracing this level of indeterminacy.  

If I may copy and paste from my own work,  

digital humanities are fundamental to any insightful observation of the cultural landscape of the 21st century in as much as they focus on the key aspects of the current paradigm shift: the study of the epistemology, ontology and phenomenology of textuality in the so-called digital age. 

(I mean “textuality” in the broadest sense of the term). In the words of the editors of the Companion to Digital Humanities, 

Especially since the 1990s, with the advent of the World Wide Web, digital humanities has broadened its reach, yet it has remained in touch with the goals that have animated it from the outset: using information technology to illuminate the human record, and bringing and understanding of the human record to bear on the development and use of information technology. (2004: xxiii).

What does “using information technology” mean?  It certainly means something more than merely using a word processor and an email client (or a blogging platform), but it does not only mean computerised “textual” analysis.

I know I am not the only one who thinks that any definition of the territory covered by Digital Humanities should be as fluid and open as the mediasphere it works in, on, with and at.

Even though it is still necessary and useful to find ways of explaining what the specificity of the field is, any discussion of its ontology would have to aim for diversity, inclusion and continuous and flexible debate. The question is more complicated than it seems.  This can only be a good thing. 

HASTAC Scholarship

HASTAC stands for Humanites, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Laboratory. It is one of the most exciting online academic projects out there that I know of.

Based on the medieval model of the scholarly monk, academic research can often seem and in fact be solipsistic. Often the thoroughness required for postgraduate study hyper-specialises subjects and therefore leaves scholars with little time to actually communicate to others what they are doing.

The web is of course changing this dramatically, and even in an age in which “peer review” and “publish or perish” remain the terms to know, academic culture in the humanities is being quickly transformed. Teachers, researchers, librarians, academic administrators, university students and all possible combinations and variations thereof are now continually sharing publicly what they do and when, where and how they do it.

For people studying how Internet technology affects the way we do and think about things (and who study the Internet as a way or ways of thinking too), contributing to the social construction of knowledge inside and outside the brick-and-mortar classroom and library is not just a demand of the times, it is a natural, essential part of our research.  HASTAC knows this well and is indeed, conceptually and pragmatically, an ongoing exercise in 21st century scholarship, blurring the borders between the institutional and the personal, the online and the offline, etc. 

Therefore I am profoundly honoured to have been nominated and selected for the HASTAC Scholars Program. I’ll be one of more than 145 scholars from around the world who will share their adventures in digital academia through blog posts, tweets and other online resources. I am really proud and happy that my colleague Claire Ross and I will be representing University College London this year. 

The 21st century scriptorium has many windows. It is not a room with a view but a room with many views; views that often juxtapose themselves. The screen and the keyboard (and often the screen as keyboard) can no longer be only at one single particular place and time on campus.

We all work from a particular situation in a specific location at a given time, but simultaneously there are hundreds, thousands of others working at their own desks in different countries, languages, time zones, disciplines. Establishing connections among us is not an end in itself; it’s merely the beginning. 

The conversation continues.